cleemneti
- EarthCache
- GCHFT2
- by geoaware
- Location:
- New South Wales, Australia
- S 35° 40.042′ E 150° 18.302′
While this Geocache of the Week may not have a puzzle to solve or even a physical cache container, geocachers must uncover a geologic mystery to earn a smiley for this cache.
In honor of International EarthCache Day, we’re traveling back 280 million years to the EarthCache that started it all.
Before there were thousands of EarthCaches scattered across the globe, there was just one.
In January 2004, a geocacher and member of the Geological Society of America named geoaware introduced a new kind of geocaching adventure. Instead of searching for a cleverly hidden container, geocachers would use their observation skills to discover something else hiding in plain sight, sometimes for millions of years!
Located in New South Wales, Australia, Earthcache I – a simple geology tour of Wasp Head (GCHFT2) takes geocachers on a journey through time. But don’t let the name fool you; this geocache is anything but simple.
The cache page describes a very different New South Wales as it was during the Permian period. The area lay beneath a shallow sea, while glaciers moved across the nearby land. As pieces of ice broke away and drifted over the water, they carried rocks with them. When the ice melted, those rocks dropped into the mud on the sea floor.
As you make your way along the coastline, you’ll encounter evidence of ancient environments preserved in the stone. Look closely, and you may discover fossilized burrows, traces of creatures that once lived in the sediment.
What began as one educational adventure in Australia helped spark an entirely new way to geocache. More than two decades later, tens of thousands of EarthCaches continue to encourage geocachers around the world to slow down, look a little closer, and discover the stories written in the ground beneath their feet.
This International EarthCache Day, we celebrated the cache that started it all and the curiosity that keeps EarthCaching alive.
Continue to explore some of the most amazing geocaches around the world.
Check out all of the Geocaches of the Week on the Geocaching blog. If you would like to nominate a Geocache of the Week, fill out this form.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
